A Quote by Jonathan Swift

A little grain of the romance is no ill ingredient to preserve and exalt the dignity of human nature, without which it is apt to degenerate into everything that is sordid, vicious and low.

Jonathan Swift

Quote Topics

Apt Degenerate Dignity Everything Grain Human Human Nature Ill Ingredient Little Low Nature Preserve Romance Vicious Which Without

Quote Author

Jonathan Swift
Irish - Writer
November 30, 1667 - October 19, 1745

Prudence is a necessary ingredient in all the virtues, without which they degenerate into folly and excess.

Jeremy Collier

In a revolutionary age talk of equality may well have represented a passion to provide full human dignity to those who had previously been denied it by systems of political and economic domination; but in the present age it softens the spiritual requirements that are an essential ingredient in human dignity. Thus the slogans of equality serve not so much to elevate individuals to the dignity of being human as to free them from the responsibility of rising to this vocation.

Merold Westphal

Everything that looks to the future elevates human nature; for life is never so low or so little as when occupied with the present.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Everything that looks to the future elevates human nature; for never is life so low or so little as when occupied with the present.

Walter Savage Landor

At a time when opportunism is everything, when hope seems lost, when everything boils down to a cynical business deal, we must find the courage to dream. To reclaim romance. The romance of believing in justice, in freedom, and in dignity. For everybody.

Arundhati Roy

The spiritual life is part of the human essence. It is a defining characteristic of human nature, without which human nature is not fully human.

Abraham Maslow

Kindness is not without its rocks ahead. People are apt to put it down to an easy temper and seldom recognize it as the secret striving of a generous nature; whilst, on the other hand, the ill-natured get credit for all the evil they refrain from.

Honore de Balzac

So, that was Nature's way. The mosquito felt pain and panic but the dragonfly knew nothing of cruelty. Humans would call it evil, the big dragonfly destroying the mosquito and ignoring the little insects suffering. Yet humans hated mosquitoes too, calling them vicious and bloodthirsty. All these words, words like 'evil' and 'vicious', they meant nothing to Nature. Yes, evil was a human invention.

John Marsden

There's no possibility of being witty without a little ill-nature.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

We stand in need of such reflections to comfort us for the loss of some illustrious characters, which in our eyes might have seemed the most worthy of the heavenly present. The names of Seneca, of the elder and the younger Pliny, of Tacitus, of Plutarch, of Galen, of the slave Epictetus, and of the emperor Marcus Antoninus, adorn the age in which they flourished, and exalt the dignity of human natures.

Edward Gibbon

A man without force, is without the essential dignity of humanity. Human nature is so constituted, that it cannot honor a helpless man, although it can pity him.

Frederick Douglass

A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small, daily acts of courage which help to preserve man's self-respect and inherent human dignity.

Aung San Suu Kyi

Most importantly for me growing up, it was a spirituals, it was a gospels, it was James Cleveland, Aretha Franklin, Marion Williams; and then it was Curtis Mayfield - The Main Ingredient, The Whispers, Black Blue Magic, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Luther Vandross - that music helped me preserves my sanity, help me preserve whatever dignity I was able to preserve, helping to keep going. It was a source of tremendous strength in my life.

Cornel West

Nature has given women two painful but heavenly gifts, which distinguish them, and often raise them above human nature,--compassion and enthusiasm. By compassion, they devote themselves; by enthusiasm they exalt themselves.

Alphonse de Lamartine

Imagination is the organ through which the soul within us recognizes a soul without us; the spiritual eye by which the mind perceives and converses with the spiritualities of nature under her material forms; which tends to exalt even the senses into soul by discerning a soul in the objects of sense.